Well... I think I'm underwhelmed, though I'm not quite sure.
(Later edit: IMHO, Scriptor's comment invalidates much of this, though I'll leave it for posterity's sake. Thank you.)
Tron 1 wasn't about "lightcycles". If you honor the original movie and understand it, it should be clear that lightcycles are just part of the local landscape because of the lightcycle game, along with the other stuff there. Another contemporaneous computer system would have more local flavor; modern computer systems have yet more richness to draw on.
If Tron 2 is just the standard Hollywood mishmash rehashing of old themes with no particular comprehension of what made the original special, count me out. Tron ought to be something that can be made into a universe as rich as Star Trek, honestly, if you take the core concepts from the first movie and just run with it, but if you're going to get stuck on "remixing" the peripheral concepts, meh.
I might be wrong, and this might be in a "game" context, though it still seems pretty abusive of the lightcycle context.
I think rather than being a full trailer for the movie, this is more of a single, and visually cool, scene to hype up people not familiar to the original.
Movies are as much (or more) a visual medium than an intellectual medium. Visuals are every bit as important as ideas. But visuals are the easiest part to convey in a trailer, and the lightcycles are the coolest visual element of Tron.
It's kind of like how in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, they kept the Viper launch tubes because it was an awesome visual, and they had the scanny-red-eye Cylons. It didn't keep them from cutting to the heart of the ideas of BSG (survival and escape from a mechanical, inhuman enemy) but the visuals were just as much at the heart.
Let me put it this way--if there was a Tron movie that was perfectly true to the ideas of the original, but without any lightcycles at all, that would be just as wrong as making a Tron sequel that's all about lightcycles.
The deal with the Lightcycles is that over the past 20 years it's become the most recognizable aspect from Tron. It's one of the few things that can give you a large view of the Tron world in a short amount of time and without getting too indepth. That's why the director chose to showcase that in a VFX showcase to get the job; it charts very high on the "WOW"-meter
I think you're right on all counts, but.. I was just so into the original movie and the games (arcade, discs, and INTV DD) as a kid that the trailer still makes me giddy!
So I thought the cycles looked absolutely great! But the people looked badly animated. Their limbs moved in a way that seemed to me like the motion equivalent of the uncanny valley.
I immediately noticed that too and I'm wondering, why insist on doing CGI characters instead of the plain old green screen? The CGI characters fit more seamlessly into the scene, yes, but I find mocuh more easy to ignore the small imperfections of green screen compositing than the weird movements of CGI characters.
(Later edit: IMHO, Scriptor's comment invalidates much of this, though I'll leave it for posterity's sake. Thank you.)
Tron 1 wasn't about "lightcycles". If you honor the original movie and understand it, it should be clear that lightcycles are just part of the local landscape because of the lightcycle game, along with the other stuff there. Another contemporaneous computer system would have more local flavor; modern computer systems have yet more richness to draw on.
If Tron 2 is just the standard Hollywood mishmash rehashing of old themes with no particular comprehension of what made the original special, count me out. Tron ought to be something that can be made into a universe as rich as Star Trek, honestly, if you take the core concepts from the first movie and just run with it, but if you're going to get stuck on "remixing" the peripheral concepts, meh.
I might be wrong, and this might be in a "game" context, though it still seems pretty abusive of the lightcycle context.